1

SUMMARY

Churchyard and cemetery in an English industrial city: Sheffield, 1740-1900

Accounts of nineteenth-century burial practice in England borrow heavily from French

historiography, which describes the way that scientific agendas drove a shift from traditional

churchyard use to secular, municipal cemetery management. A challenge to this meta-

narrative uses the example of Sheffield. In this highly industrialised city, the nineteenth-

century did not see a dichotomised translation from churchyard to cemetery: the Church

Building Acts (1818) was more effective in meeting burial demand than the 1836 General

Cemetery; the formal closure of churchyards did not always lead to a cessation of burial; and

by the century’s end, Church burial provision remained substantial.

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Churchyard and cemetery in an English industrial city

The historiography of mortality in England has sought to define a new ‘modernity’ in burial

practice in the nineteenth century, often focussing on the cemetery as a signifier of shifting

sensibilities. Commentary has tended to lack a firm grounding in place: indeed, much of the

basic framework has been borrowed from French burial historiography. This paper takes an

alternative approach, and instead locates the history of burial within a very specific English

place, taking into account its urban development and associated changes in urban governance.

Urban histories of the English Victorian city usually include cemeteries in a list of elements

essential to urban infrastructure alongside gas and water supply, sewerage, transport

developments and civic buildings.1 Cemeteries sit a little uneasily in this framework, since –

unlike other sanitary improvements – burial had long been a function of the Church of

England. The efforts of sanitary reformers including Edwin Chadwick led to the formulation

of new interment regulations based on sanitary principles. In this regard, it appears, burial

had moved from the realms of the spiritual into a more secular and scientific domain. The

Burial Acts – passed from the early 1850s – in principle established the Home Office as a

central arbiter on matters relating to interment, and introduced procedures to effect

churchyard closure.

In practice the legislation underlined the continuing and central role of the Church of

England in the provision of space for interment. In many cities, responsibility for decisions

on new cemetery development was taken by individual parish vestries. London’s St Pancras

vestry was amongst the first to take advantage of the legislation, and opened an 88-acre site at

Finchley in 1854.2 The Burial Acts did not make cemeteries an inevitable development.

Guided by ratepayer vote, vestries could also legally decide that their local burial needs were

best served by an extension to the existing churchyard. It is notable that in the second half of

the nineteenth century, this latter option was by far the most popular: a parliamentary return

indicated that between 1863 and 1877 there were at least 2,125 instances of churchyard

1 See, for example, A. S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain(London, 1983); B. M. Doyle, ‘The changing functions of urban government: councillors,officials and pressure groups’, in M. Daunton (ed.) The Cambridge Urban History of Britainvol III: 1840-1950 (Cambridge, 2001).2 C. Brooks et al., Mortal Remains. The History and Present State of the Victorian andEdwardian Cemetery (Exeter, 1989), 50.

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extension in that fourteen-year period alone.3 The continued centrality of the Church of

England in this regard indicates that burial history was in no way linear: in the second half of

the nineteenth century, a complex ‘mixed economy’ of burial provision – which had

comprised Anglican churchyards, Nonconformist burial grounds and private cemeteries and

chapels – became, if anything, even more confused.

This far from straightforward history of burials must itself be lodged within a context

of substantial and rapid urban expansion. There were two aspects of this expansion that are

particularly notable in the case of burial: the subdivision of existing parishes and creation of

new parishes and new parish churches; and the lava-like overflow of town and city

populations to absorb surrounding small hamlets and townships that had their own tradition

of burial provision. These two elements were certainly evident in the growth of Sheffield,

which is the principal focus of this study. In 1801, the six townships that comprised Sheffield

parish had a population of 46,000 but by the century’s mid-point this number had reached

135,310. By the century’s end, the figure had more than doubled again, to 381,793 without

any change to the parish boundary.4 Sheffield had long been reliant on burial space around its

central Parish Church,5 the eighteenth-century churches of St Paul and St James, and a small

handful of Dissenting burial grounds. The opening of the Sheffield General Cemetery by the

General Cemetery Company in 1836 comprised an extensive and sanitary addition, situated

on the outskirts of Sheffield township. However, the General Cemetery was just one element

of new provision constituting a ‘solution’ to the problem of burial, and by no means the most

decisive. Other new provision included the churchyards of the 1820s ‘Million Act’ churches

and the boom of church building from the 1840s; extensions to existing churchyards,

sometimes detached from the mother church; and finally new cemeteries established under

the Burial Acts. A linear progression from churchyard to cemetery was certainly not evident

here, and this fact provokes a review of some of the central contentions of the grand

narratives of mortality in the nineteenth century.

31877 (438) Churchyards. Return of all parishes in England and Wales in which any newportion of ground has been consecrated to serve as a churchyard since the last return madeto Parliament in 1863; distinguishing those which have been purchased by the parish andthose which have been purchased by voluntary subscription, or presented as a free gift.2.4 S. Pollard, ‘The growth of population’, in D. L. Linton (ed.), Sheffield and its Region(Sheffield, 1956), 172ff; A. D. H. Crook, ‘Appendix: Population and boundary changes’ in C.Binfield et al. (ed.), The History of the City of Sheffield, 1843-1993, Vol II: Society(Sheffield, 1993), 482–5.5 The Parish Church had various dedications, and was later designated a cathedral. For thisperiod, primary resources tend simply to refer to ‘the Parish Church’.

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Burial historiography

English cemetery historiography borrows a great deal from its French counterpart, and in

particular from a small handful of studies focussed on burial before, during and immediately

after the French Revolution. These studies demonstrate that Enlightenment thinkers had

problematised burial as a consequence of scientific theories on the generation of disease. At

the same time, architects were indulging in new cemetery design projects. Regulations

prescribing burial depth and plot sizes and an early Revolutionary insistence on equality and

limited rights to commemorate the dead were superseded by the stronger cultural imperative

to memorialise the family unit within a single plot, purchased in perpetuity. Revolutionary

and utilitarian extra-mural cemeteries were superseded by the rather more bourgeois Père

Lachaise, where family graves were located within a studiedly Romantic landscape.

Nevertheless, the process of re-conceiving burial space posed a formal challenge to the

Church in France, by shifting interment into scientific and sanitary paradigms.6

This specific narrative is generally placed within the broader framework developed by

Philippe Ariès, who contended that conceptions of death in the nineteenth century could best

be characterised by an over-arching concern for the ‘death of the other’. Grief caused by

personal bereavement became central to cultural understandings of mortality, replacing an

earlier dominant concern that the dying self would die ‘a good death’, fully shriven and

awaiting final judgement. The change in attitudes to death explained alterations to burial

practice. According to Johnson, ‘It is only with a growing atheism in the West and the bourgeois

appropriation of the cemetery that we find the gradual establishment of a “cult of the dead” and a

deep, sentimental concern for the corpse.’7 For those able to afford it, perpetuity burial could

offer eternal protection from disturbance; and within the cemetery the ability to purchase burial

rights reformulated burial space as private property. Commentators have stressed that this

option was available only to the wealthy: the dead of the poorer classes disappeared into

6 P. Ariès, The Hour of our Death, trans H. Weaver (Harmondsworth, 1983); R. Etlin, TheArchitecture of Death (Cambridge MA, 1984); T. A. Kselman, Death and the Afterlife inModern France (Princeton, 1993), J. McManners, Death and the Enlightenment (Oxford,1981); J. C. Riley, The Eighteenth-Century Campaign to Avoid Disease (New York, NY,1987); P. Trompette and R. Howell Griffiths, ‘L’economie morale de la mort au XIXe siècle.Regards croiséssur la France at l’Angleterre’, Le Mouvement Social, 237 (2011), 33–54; M.Vovelle and R. Bertrand, La Ville des Morts: Essaisur L’Imaginaire Urbain Contemporaind’Après les Cimetières Provençaux (Paris, 1983).7 P. Johnson, ‘The changing face of the modern cemetery: Loudon’s design for life and death’Heterotopia Studies, (2012). heterotopiastudies.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/5/4.3-modern-cemetery. Accessed 5 Apr 2013.

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common graves that were periodically re-used, with bones displaced into a large central

ossuary.8

New cemeteries also constituted a physical dislocation of practice: congruent with

scientific understandings of injurious ‘mephitic vapours’, cemeteries were sited away from

the church and on the periphery of settlement. Distance from the spiritual core of the

community was literal and symbolic: indeed, for some commentators the cemetery becomes

loaded with modernist purpose. Here there is another heavy reliance on Ariès’ grand schema

characterising changing attitudes towards death, contrasting an ancient accommodation with

the dead – decomposing in a commingled mass at the centre of the settlement, amongst the

living – with a modern anxiety to hide evidences of bodily decay and place the corpse in

individuated graves.9 Indeed, recent historiography has developed Michel Foucault’s

conception of the cemetery both as a ‘heterotopia’ or other place, and a space in which new

models for governance of the body were exercised.10

The central tenets of this historiography have been absorbed into the English history

of burial with only slight amendment and without necessarily allowing for a more nuanced

cultural specificity. English burial historiography situates the emergence of the cemetery

more firmly in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the joint stock financial

framework was applied to cemetery development.11 Reference is generally made to Père

Lachaise and the ‘garden cemetery’ as a landscape paradigm borrowed by early cemetery

advocates and designers, including John Claudius Loudon and John Strang.12 Cemetery

companies, established in almost all major towns and cities in the second quarter of the

nineteenth century, created burial sites that challenged Anglican monopolies. For some

commentators, the foundation of these new cemeteries was symbolic of a substantial shift in

societal understanding with regard to mortality: the cemetery was ‘a visibly commercial

8 T. Laqueur, ‘Cemeteries, religion and the culture of capitalism’, in J. Garnett and C.Matthew (eds) Revival and Religion since 1700 (London, 1993).9 M. Ragon, The Space of Death: A Study of Funerary Architecture, Decoration andUrbanism (Charlottesville, VA, 1983).10 Johnson, ‘Changing face’, and also P. Johnson, ‘The modern cemetery: a design for life’,Social and Cultural Geography, 9 (2008) 777–790.11 J. Rugg, ‘The emergence of a new burial form: cemetery development in the first half ofthe nineteenth century’, in M. Cox (ed.) Grave Matters: A History of Burial, 1700-1850(York, 1998).12 J. C. Loudon, On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries; and on theImprovement of Churchyards (London, 1843); J. Strang, Necropolis Glasguensis withObservations on Ancient and Modern Tombs and Sepulture (Glasgow, 1831); J. C. Curl, TheVictorian Celebration of Death (Stroud, 2000).

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institution’ and ‘one more aspect of consumer culture’, and replaced ancient churchyards that

were imbued with substantial spiritual significance and communal resonance.13 The

immediate catalyst for burial reform was the swift pace of urban development. Rapidly

increasing population in towns and cities placed substantial pressure on existing burial

provision in the old parish churchyards, which became a liability. Superseded by cemeteries

in the 1820s and 1830s, parish churchyards were often closed by Order in Council from the

1850s as new legislation placed restrictions on the continued incidence of intramural

interment. Joyce borrows heavily from Ariès in contending that, with the cemetery, death was

‘exiled to the margins of cities, and, if not quite anonymous, became located in a place

divorced from everyday life’ and the ‘spatially specific parish rights of burial gave way to

absolute and abstract property rights.’14 Indeed, for Johnson, the cemetery evidenced ‘a

reconfigured economy of death’.15

This narrative is now beginning to be regarded as overly simplistic. The sharp

distinction between ‘churchyard’ and ‘cemetery’ rests rather too heavily on a false

dichotomisation. Churchyards were not necessarily ancient, and were as driven by economic

and even commercial imperatives as were many early cemetery speculations. Cemeteries

were not always a decisively new development, superseding earlier provision.16 Certainly in

some places this was the case: for example, in York the closure of parish churchyards

throughout the city in the 1850s gave the city’s General Cemetery a monopoly on burial

provision during the second half of the nineteenth century.17 In other places, urban

development created new settlements and new communities that had no long-standing

tradition of local interment. For example, Harrogate was developed largely as a commercial

speculation and absorbed the two very small villages of High and Low Harrogate. Neither

place had burial provision until the 1830s and villagers were reliant on the churchyard of St

John the Baptist in Knaresborough.18 Research on burial in more rural areas indicates that

new cemeteries were often located alongside existing burial space: for example, the Old

13 G. Nash, ‘Pomp and circumstances: archaeology, modernity and the corporatisation ofdeath: early social and political Victorian attitudes towards burial practice’, in P. M. Graves-Brown (ed.) Matter, Materiality and Culture (London, 2000), 113; Laqueur, ‘Cemeteries’,199.14 P. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberation and the Modern City (London, 2003), 90.15Johnson, ‘Changing face.’16 J. Rugg, Churchyard and Cemetery: Tradition and Modernity in Rural North Yorkshire(Manchester, 2013).17 H. Murray, This Garden of Death: the History of York Cemetery, 1837-2007 (York, 2008).18Rugg, Churchyard and Cemetery.

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Malton Burial Board’s cemetery at St Mary’s Priory is virtually indistinguishable from the

churchyard.19

Furthermore, simplistic narratives fail to take into account the hugely complicated

nature of urban development and the often very particular frameworks of local governance.20

This lack of a necessary local specificity in burial historiography is underlined in this paper,

which presents an extended study of burial provision in a single location: Sheffield. As will

be seen, a history of Sheffield focussing on the establishment of the cemetery supports the

notion of dichotomy and linear development but a broader burial history presents a far more

complex picture.

Sheffield: a cemetery history

The establishment of the General Cemetery in Sheffield sits very well within the specific

contentions of cemetery historiography. The cemetery was laid out by a company in 1836,

contemporaneous with the sites immediately associated with the ‘Victorian celebration of

death’, such as Nunhead and West Norwood. The London sites had a clear commercial intent,

and were very much part of the mid-1830s boom in cemetery speculation. The General

Cemetery Company at Sheffield followed earlier Nonconformist precedents in having its

origins in the play of religious politics.21 The site was not consecrated, and aimed to serve the

needs of Sheffield’s Nonconformists. In its second annual report, the Company declared that

it had been ‘instrumental in providing for every class of the great community of which they

are a part, the means of suitable and undisturbed sepulture according to the rite of their own

religious faith.’22 The new six-acre site, situated ‘on the picturesque acclivity of Sharrow

Vale’ was ‘tastefully laid out and planted.’23Company directors aimed to create a cultured

19North Yorkshire Record Office, BB/MLO 1/1 (Minutes, 1883-1924).20 D. Fraser, Power and Authority in the Victorian City (Oxford, 1979); C. Hamlin,‘Muddling in bumbledom: on the enormity of large sanitary improvements in four Britishtowns, 1855-1885’, Victorian Studies, 32 (1988), 55–83; J. Garrard, Democratisation inBritain: Elites, Civil Society and Reform Since 1800 (Basingstoke, 2002); Wohl, EndangeredLives.21 J. Rugg, ‘The Origins and Progress of Cemetery Establishment in Britain’ in P. Jupp, andG. Howarth (eds.) The Changing Face of Death (London, 1997), 105–119.22 Sheffield Archives: 106/B1/1-2, Minutes of the General Cemetery Company, 30 Sep 1836.23 W. White, Gazetteer and General Directory of Sheffield and all the Towns, Parishes,Townships and Villages, within the Distance of Twenty Miles Round Sheffield (Sheffield,1852), 19.

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resort for promenade and contemplation and in 1837 attached a stonemason’s business which,

it was hoped, would ‘secure them the richest display of elegance, propriety and taste in the

varied memorials which affection might place before the ashes of departed friends.’24 The

cemetery constituted a fitting addition to other new cultural ‘assets’ for Sheffield that

included the nearby Botanical Gardens. Indeed, the landscape designer of the gardens –

Robert Marnock – was asked to oversee planting to the extension to the cemetery in the late

1840s.25 This extension was wholly consecrated, and aimed to extend the appeal of the

cemetery beyond its original market. The site was successful in attracting elite burials: Mark

Firth, manufacturer and philanthropist, had donated a local park and served as Mayor; and

prominent clergy, including Canon Thomas Sale had been an active promoter of church and

school building.26

A cemetery could not have been more necessary and, situated on the edge of Sheffield

township, comprised a sanitary response to the problem of overcrowding in the churchyards

and burial grounds located in the central district. Sheffield was expanding rapidly, and public

health reports outlined in detail the inadequate nature of Sheffield’s intramural churchyards.

For example, in 1845, James Smith reported to the Royal Commission on the Health of

Towns on burials around the Parish Church:

It is very much crowded with bodies, and as the soil is considerably above the level of

the surrounding street, the exudation of putrid liquid from the soil is visible to the eye

and offensive to the smell. The soil being a tenacious clay, the decay of the bodies is

slow; and where graves are opened, the skeletons are often found still articulated, and

their exhumation is most offensive to the inhabitants residing within sight of the

burial ground.27

James Haywood and William Lee, from the newly established General Board of Health, also

reported on conditions in the city’s churchyards and were no less forthright:

24Sheffield Archives: 106/B1/1-2, Minutes of the General Cemetery Company, 23 Aug 1837.25 Brooks, Mortal Remains, 174.26 W. Odom, Memorials of Sheffield: Its Cathedral and Parish Churches (Sheffield, 1927),208.27 James Smith, ‘Report on the condition of the town of Sheffield’, in Second Report of theCommissioners for Inquiring into the State of Large Towns and Populous Districts, vol. II(London, 1845), 157

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If people were aware of the painful and disgusting sights which frequently present

themselves in preparing a grave, and of the amount of poison which they are

constantly breathing, and sometimes drinking, from the dead, it would produce a deep

feeling of horror, and a unanimous effort to put an end to the practice.28

Three years later, Haywood and Lee calculated that between 1839 and 1846, over 14,000

interments had taken place in the Church of England churchyards in Sheffield’s densely-

populated central township.29

Smith’s report had referred favourably to the cemetery: ‘for whether we consider the

health and comfort of the inhabitants, or the softer feelings of the relatives of the dead, or

generally, feelings of public decency, we must approve of the arrangement of having burial

places in a remote and undisturbed locality.’30 However, the opening of the cemetery did not

in itself effect closure of the central churchyards, which required specific legislation. Outside

of London, the process of churchyard and burial ground closure was defined by section 1 of

the Burial Act (1853).31 The Act specified that closure would follow if a General Board of

Health burial inspector thought it necessary, and a specific Order in Council would be issued

for each churchyard indicating the date from which discontinuation would be effective and

any conditions or exceptions. All closure orders were printed in the London Gazette. For

Sheffield, the closure Order – issued on the 8th February 1855 – listed the churchyards of the

Parish Church, St James’s, St George’s, St Philip’s, St Mary’s, St John’s, and the church at

Attercliffe, and a number of small denominational burial grounds. As might be expected,

interments at the General Cemetery increased sharply and dramatically following the

closures, from 400-500 annually to an average of over 1300 a year between 1855 and 1860.32

Thus, burial ceased at ‘t’owd church’, as it had been known to generations, bringing to an end

a practice that had endured since the twelfth century.33

Sheffield: a burial history

28 J. Haywood and W. Lee, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Borough of Sheffield,Sheffield, 1848), 13429 Ibid.30 Smith, ‘Report’, 15731Burial Act, 1853 (16&17 Vict.C. 134, s1). See James Brooke Little, The Law of Burial(London, 1902).32Sheffield Archives: CA697, General Cemetery Company Burial Registers, 1836-1978.33 E. R. Wickham, Church and People in an Industrial City (London, 1957), 33

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In presenting this cemetery history of Sheffield, conclusions might be drawn on a substantial

disruption to traditional burial practice presented by the opening of the cemetery and

consequent closure of the town’s more central churchyards. In these circumstances, it

becomes entirely possible to load the cemetery with political, commercial or even

‘modernist’ meaning, in contradistinction to the ancient tradition represented by burial in the

Parish Church. However, the foregoing narrative presents a poor reflection of the complexity

of Sheffield’s burial history, which at times appeared to be a rather desperate scramble to

meet demand for burial space. Burial history in Sheffield is best understood as the accretion

of overlapping layers of new burial space, brought by a variety of providers. Charting this

history is relatively straightforward since throughout the nineteenth century the boundaries of

the ancient parish of Sheffield did not change. Indeed in 1843, the newly incorporated

borough boundary was matched to the original parish. Large parishes containing a number of

distinct settlements often had dispersed burial provision. This was certainly the case in

Sheffield, which contained five townships: Sheffield, Ecclesall-Bierlow, Brightside-Bierlow,

Attercliffe-cum-Darnall, Nether Hallam and Upper Hallam (see Map 1). Although Sheffield

was by far the most heavily populated of the townships, containing some 68 per cent of the

whole parish population, other townships in the borough were themselves of substantial size.

For example, Ecclesall-Bierlow had a population of 5,362 in 1801 and its neighbour

Brightside-Bierlow had 4,030.34 The history of burial in Sheffield is therefore best construed

as an amalgam of the burial histories of these five places.

Within the wider parish area, burial took place from the twelfth century in the Parish

Church and its three-acre churchyard, located in Sheffield township. Other provision was

available at Attercliffe: burials took place at the Old Chapel – opened in 1629 – and

continued despite the creation of a larger New Chapel in 1663. A formal Quaker meeting was

established in Sheffield township in 1678, and there is evidence of burials at the meeting

house from the mid-eighteenth century.35At Ecclesall, burial provision only became available

after the fourteenth-century chapel at Millhouses was relocated to Carter Knowle and

rededicated to All Saints in 1789: the new church had a two-acre churchyard.36The creation

of All Saints took place during what might be regarded as the first wave of new burial

provision which spanned the final decades of the eighteenth century and stretched into the

early years of the nineteenth. Between 1561 and 1720, burials in the churchyards of the

34 Crook, ‘Population and boundary change’, 48235Wickham, Church and People, 39.36 Odom, Memorials of Sheffield, 74.

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parish had been rising steadily from an annual average of around 60 to c.500 annually. From

this point in the eighteenth century, burials began a sharp and substantial increase.37 The

building of St Paul’s, to the west of the Parish Church on the township periphery, was

completed in 1720; a church dispute meant that interments did not take place until after 1743.

The churchyard at the Old Chapel at Attercliffe was extended in 1754 and 1786. By the

1780s, well over 1,000 interments a year were taking place across all the parish churchyards.

St James’, consecrated in 1789, was financed through the sale of shares at £50 which entitled

the purchaser to a pew and a family vault beneath the chapel.38 The site contributed little to

meeting demand for burial space: numbers did not generally exceed 50 a year. Various

Protestant Nonconformist denominations also opened burial grounds and Roman Catholic

provision was available, but Haywood and Lee’s survey of burial provision in the late 1840s

indicated that, between 1839 and 1846, interments in those locations totalled just 735 against

the 14,096 burials taking place in the Anglican churchyards.39A two-acre detached

churchyard extension for the Parish Church was consecrated in 1817, situated on the western

edge of Sheffield township, between Broad Lane and Portobello, and the Old Chapel

churchyard at Attercliffe was extended again in 1816.40

By the early 1820s, therefore, the parish of Sheffield had already seen a wave of new

developments that augmented its ancient provision without necessarily replacing it. Use of

these new burial places was driven by preference rather than need, particularly with regard to

recourse to the burial vaults of St James’ or the Nonconformist chapel yards. From the 1820s

a second wave of new burial provision was to have perhaps a more radical and long-standing

impact, in the construction of four new churches under the Church Building Act (1818),

popularly called the ‘Million Act’ since the Act dedicated that sum to new church building.

Across England, the Million Act was responsible for creating more new burial space in the

1820s and 1830s than the first generation of joint-stock cemeteries that were a contemporary

development. In Sheffield township, three Million Act churches were built during the 1820s.

St George’s was a chapel of ease for the Parish Church, and was situated on the detached

churchyard extension on Broad Lane. The church was completed in 1825, and burials are

recorded from 1830. St Philip’s was originally constructed within a wooded suburb to the

northwest, and its churchyard opened for interments in 1828. The third, and grandest, of this

37 Figures on churchyard burial taken from various records held at the Sheffield Archive.38Wickham, Church and People, 48.39 Haywood and Lee, Sanitary Condition,134.40 F. Stirling, ‘Grave re-use: a feasibility study’, Sheffield University Ph.D. thesis, 2009), 32.

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group of churches was St Mary’s, Bramall Lane. The church was located in one of the

wealthiest suburbs of the city in 1830, on land donated by the Duke of Norfolk and had three

acres of burial space. The New Chapel at Attercliffe was also rebuilt under the Million Act in

1826 with a churchyard, and rededicated as Christ Church. Although not strictly speaking

Million Act churches, two other additions to the city were notable in the 1830s. St John’s,

Park, was located in Sheffield township and built in 1838 by subscription. Land for the

church was again donated by the Duke of Norfolk, and the churchyard was three acres in

extent. Christ Church at Fulwood in Ecclesall, wholly financed by a private individual, was

consecrated just a year later.

Immediate and heavy use was made of all the new churchyards. Indeed, there were

around 430 interments in the churchyard of St Philip’s in its first year of operation, although

this figure dropped as interments began at St Mary’s and St George’s. In the first ten years of

use, burials in this latter churchyard alone increased to over 500 a year. Interments at St

Paul’s and the Parish Church decreased markedly but remained high, with use of the Parish

Church largely matching burials at St George’s (see Chart 1). As a consequence of this new

churchyard provision, the opening of the General Cemetery in 1836 did not bring with it an

immediate relocation of burials. In the first five years of its operation, interments there

totalled no more than 215 a year, and through the 1840s still only averaged around 500.41

Even the consecrated addition to the site, with its grand and commodious Anglican chapel,

did not substantially alter the pattern of existing burials within the parish churchyards of the

various townships. Burials in this section averaged no more than a hundred a year in the first

five years.42 There was a rapid increase in burials at the General Cemetery following the

closure of the Sheffield township churchyards, with annual interments far in excess of 1,000 a

year. Nevertheless, until the opening of Burngreave Cemetery in 1862, the General Cemetery

was still only accommodating around half of the city’s interments. Thus it was clear that the

Church of England retained a substantial hold on burial provision after 1836

41 Sheffield Archives: CA697, General Cemetery Company Burial Registers, 1836-1978.42Ibid.

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Source: Sheffield Archives: selected burial registers.

Through the 1840s and 1850s another new context for the ownership and management

of consecrated burial space emerged as a consequence of changes in the structure of both

local and ecclesiastical governance. In Sheffield until 1843, local government had been

essentially medieval in its structure and organisation. Local improvement had been financed

by an ancient body of Church Burgesses and Town Trustees. Improvement Commissioners

had been appointed in 1818 and dealt with policing and lighting, but the Duke of Devonshire

– as Lord of the Manor – retained responsibility for governing the market area. Each

township had a system of overseers funded from the parish rate, and from 1843 there were

two Poor Law Unions – Sheffield and Ecclesall. All these bodies had somewhat confused and

overlapping functions. A municipal charter was granted for Sheffield in 1843, superseding

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the Church Burgesses and Town Trustees who remained in a largely charitable role. The

emergent Sheffield Town Council became embroiled in the play of local radical politics,

which tended to stifle public health expenditure.43 A Health Committee operated from 1846,

but there was no Medical Officer of Health until 1873.44 It is notable that none of these

agencies necessarily viewed the provision of burial space as a central concern. Although it

was clear that intramural interment was a sanitary matter, Improvement Commissioners

tended to focus on issues such as sewerage and housing conditions. Burial was still largely

regarded as the responsibility of the Church of England through the aegis of local vestries:

one of the functions of the church rate was to finance the maintenance of the churchyard and

any necessary extensions.

In Sheffield, the Church of England was itself also subject to organisational change.

Under the New Parishes Act (1843), the Ecclesiastical Commissioners were empowered to

make sub-divisions of existing parishes to increase spiritual provision in the more populous

districts. Following the passage of the Act, Sheffield ceased to be a single parish. In the first

of what became a rapid accretion of parish subdivisions, the Million Act churches were

themselves used as new parish churches, as was – amongst others – St John’s, Park. The Act

also provided a context for the provision of fresh burial space. St Thomas, Crookes, Christ

Church at Dore, Holy Trinity at Darnall and Christ Church at Heeley, which were all built by

private subscription or donation in the 1820s and 1830s, took the opportunity created by the

subdivision to begin interring in their churchyards.45 This process of subdivision removed the

parochial rights of the parishioners of the ‘old’ parish of Sheffield to be buried in the Parish

Church, but the new sites were rapidly adopted: within ten years of its opening, St John’s,

Park, was accommodating over 500 burials a year.46

The passage of the Burial Acts from the early 1850s therefore occurred during a

period of substantial change in Sheffield’s civic and ecclesiastical governance and

consequent alteration to the pattern of burial provision. The fact that the Burial Acts have

generally not been well understood is an eloquent comment on their complexity. The Burial

Act (1853) extended the powers of the Burial Act (1852) beyond London and permitted the

creation of new cemeteries using funds raised against the church or poor rate. A long series of

further enactments was finally brought to a close with the Burial Act (1906). Unlike French

43 Fraser, Power and Authority, 139ff.44 G. P. Jones, ‘Civic administration’ in Linton, Sheffield and its Region, 181–8345 Odom, Memorials of Sheffield, various pages.46 Brooke Little, Law of Burial, 569ff.

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burial legislation, under which translation from the use of churchyard to cemetery became

mandatory, the English Burial Acts were not prescriptive. Instead, the Acts relied on an

ancient process for local decision-making: a local vestry vote decided whether the powers

created would be adopted. Burial boards could be formed following a ratepayer vote at a

meeting called specifically to consider the creation of a board. Membership of the board was

also based on vestry vote, and all expenditure above a specified level had to be approved by

the vestry. A Burials Office at Whitehall oversaw the operation of the legislation, but its

interventions were reactive rather than proactive. The legislation was largely permissive, and

relied on vestry initiative. Loans were raised against the local rate, either from the Public

Works Loan Board or – often more competitively – from local financiers.47

There is perhaps no agency of local governance less amenable to simple explanation

than the vestry, particularly where the operation of burial legislation is concerned. ‘Vestry’

carried both ecclesiastical and civic connotations.48 Church parish matters were governed by

the vestry, which had responsibility for – amongst other things – the appointment of parish

officers who oversaw the collection of the church rate and specific rates for various civic

purposes. As has been seen, the church rate was applied to maintenance of the church fabric,

including any necessary work to the churchyard where, in common law, parishioners had a

right to burial. As a consequence, Church of England vestries played a central role in new

burial board establishment. The matter was complicated by further burial acts: the Burial Act

(1854) extended the powers to create burial boards to town councils, and the Burial Act

(1857) extended the powers again to include improvement commissioners and local boards of

health. In fact, the law on the matter became somewhat opaque. Reflecting the chaotic nature

of local governance and the rather fluid definition of ‘parish’, it appeared that in principle the

powers could be adopted by any ‘vestry-like’ agency.49

Within Sheffield, the powers granted under the Burial Acts were adopted by four

separate vestries. The closure order for the old and new churchyards at Attercliffe in 1855 led

immediately to the creation of Attercliffe Burial Board in May of the same year. A degree of

connection between the Burial Board and the ecclesiastical vestry of Christ Church is

intimated by the fact that the vicar of the church, the Reverend T. Wilkinson, was

immediately elected as Board chairman. The Board considered it expedient to lay out new

47 Rugg, Cemetery and Churchyard, chapter 5.48 D. Eastwood, Governing Rural England: Tradition and Transformation in LocalGovernment (Oxford, 1994); K. Snell, Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity andWelfare in England and Wales, 1700-1950 (Cambridge, 2006), 366ff.49 Brook Little, Law of Burial, 230.

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burial space adjacent to the existing churchyard: the proposed site was already three-parts

enclosed, and was vested in Queen Anne’s Bounty. At four acres, the site met the statutory

recommendation of one acre per thousand of population, and there was no need to establish a

mortuary chapel on the consecrated portion. Indeed, it was estimated that the cost of the

whole enterprise would not exceed £1,800.50 Similarly, Darnall had become an ecclesiastical

district separate from Attercliffe in 1844; a church dedicated to the Holy Trinity and built by

private subscription was opened in the following year. This church also had its own burial

space, but again – as at Attercliffe – the decision was taken by the vestry to establish a burial

board, which raised finance to lay out five acres on the site of an old cricket pitch. The

Brightside Burial Board, which was responsible for opening Burngreave Cemetery in 1861,

was perhaps less an ecclesiastical than a civic endeavour. Local ratepayers had approached

the Overseers for Brightside-Bierlow, expressing concern that burial provision for poorer

classes was not readily available. An attempt was made to negotiate a favourable rate with the

Cemetery Company, but it wrote that no distinction could be made in its charges ‘by giving

preference to one Township more than another.’51 Other local churchyards at Pitsmoor and

Grimesthorpe were small, and vestries in either case could ill-afford an extension. The

Brightside-Bierlow vestry finally resolved to establish a cemetery specifically for the

township, and purchased a 37-acre site; within ten years, burials regularly reached over 1,500

a year, matching and often superseding the General Cemetery in scale of operation.

Burngreave Cemetery had come at a high cost: expenditure on the land and buildings had

been in excess of £11,000.52

Within Sheffield township, a different set of developments emerged. The closure

order of February 1855 had applied to all the major central Anglican churchyards including

the Parish Church, St James’, St George’s, St Philip’s, St Mary’s and St John’s, Park. A

further closure order was issued for St Paul’s, in March of the same year. However, Orders in

Council were not always absolute, and it was generally allowed that burial could continue in

certain circumstances. Exceptions were granted in the case of St Philip’s, St Mary’s and St

John’s, Park: interments could continue providing just one body was placed in each grave,

and that use of family vaults could continue. The closure order for St Mary’s was contested –

presumably by the vestry – repealed, and reintroduced within months but on the

understanding that interments take place according to Home Office guidelines. The closure of

50 Sheffield Archive: CA 667/1 Minute Book for the Burial Board of the Parish of Attercliffe.51 Sheffield Archive: CA 16 (6) Brightside Bierlow Minutes (Vestry), 18 Jun 1855.52 Ibid.

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St John’s churchyard was subject to even more protracted negotiations. Here, the vestry was

able to secure an extension to the closure date and then go on to lobby and obtain – over a

period of twenty years – a further thirteen extensions to the date, from what became a clearly

exasperated Burials Office.53

At the heart of the difficult lay the inability of the largely moribund Sheffield

township authorities to agree a course of action to provide new burial space.54 A burial board

for the township was finally established in 1862, but following a strong start it quickly ran

into difficulty. In this instance, the application to adopt the Burial Acts had been lodged by

the town council: aldermen and councillors were prominent in the original Board

membership, which also included Reverend Thomas Sale. The Board’s rationale was stated in

the earliest minutes, which noted that the population of the township had reached 87,703, but

was reliant on the limited burial space afforded by St John’s and St Mary’s. Following

correspondence with the Burials Office at Whitehall and a visit by Dr P. H. Holland, the

Burials Inspector, the Burial Board calculated that it would need at least 25 acres of land to

meet the township’s need. A suitable site was located, and negotiations commenced but the

estimated cost of the enterprise met with local opposition. Burial board activity – as has been

indicated – reflected the play of ratepayer democracy and in this instance ratepayers vetoed

the plans by voting for a resolution to postpone any land-purchase decision until after the

next annual Board meeting. At this meeting, ratepayers voted in Board members who steered

the enterprise into still waters. The new Board argued that the township had no need for

burial space. It was argued that existing cemeteries in neighbouring townships contained

more than 300,000 burial spaces; even within the wider parish churchyards it was calculated

that there was room for 30,000 additional interments. In principle, therefore, there was little

need to take action.55

Even as burial board operation got under way across other parts of Sheffield,

churchyard extension continued to take place. At St Philip’s, the postponed closure order

came into absolute force in 1859 and land was purchased at Wardsend by the vicar, John

Livesay. Nevertheless, it was clear within a decade or so that this slew of new provision was

again insufficient to deal with Sheffield’s population growth. The early 1880s saw another

53 St Mary’s, London Gazette, 8 Jun 1855; 29 Jun 1855; St John’s, London Gazette, 17 Aug1855; 10 Oct 1855; 5 Nov 1867; 15 Jan 1869; 2 Dec 1870; 13 Feb 1877; 5 Jul 1878; 23 May1879; 4 Nov 1879; 12 Dec 1879; 11 Mar 1881; 6 Jun 1881; 5 Mar 1885.54 On the town council at this time, see Fraser, Power and Authority, 139ff.55 Sheffield Archives: CA 38 (1) Minute Book of the Sheffield Burial Board, various dates.

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round of activity. At Walkley, the vestry of St Mary’s, consecrated in 1869, purchased four

acres to create a ‘Church Cemetery’ in Rivelin Glen, and the site was opened in 1880.

Around the same time, Attercliffe Burial Board came to the realisation that its modest

addition to the churchyard was insufficient to deal with demand for interment in the

township, where the population had expanded rapidly as a consequence of growth in the steel

industry. The cemetery had contained 3,800 grave spaces, but by 1876 there had already

been 4,080 interments. The Burial Board had evidently adopted Home Office directives

restricting the number of interments in each grave, and the soil had not been amenable to

decomposition.56 Overall, the Board concluded that ‘if no further provision be made the

inhabitants will soon have no place to bury their dead.’57 The Burial Board was anxious not

to repeat its mistakes, and proposed that the rate of population increase justified its choice of

a much larger site:

When the present cemetery was formed, the population at that time viz 1859 was

about 6000 it had only reached 7,462 in 1861 when the census was taken; in 1871 the

population had reached 16,570 or an increase of 120 per cent in ten years and we have

no reason to believe (especially should a revival of trade take place) that this increase

will not be maintained. If this should be the case the population of the township would

be in ten years from now about 53,539.58

A new cemetery was opened at Tinsley Park in 1882, and covered 19.5 acres. Attercliffe was

not the only township where pressure on burial space continued to be acute. For Sheffield

township, the hoped-for displacement of demand outside the township area had not

materialised. Interments continued at St Mary’s but a further closure order in 1880 restricted

burials substantially. At St John’s, Park the repeatedly granted postponements carried

increasingly restrictive conditions. These were evidently ignored, but it was clear by the late

1870s that no further postponements would be allowed. Movement to create a cemetery for

the township could no longer be deferred, and in the late 1870s meetings of the Burial Board

recommenced. A new 50-acre cemetery on City Road was opened in 1881.59

56 See Rugg, Churchyard and Cemetery.57 Sheffield Archive, CA 667/1 Minute Book for the Burial Board for the Parish ofAttercliffe, 6 Sep 1876.58Ibid.59 Stirling, ‘Grave re-use’, 61.

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As the remaining decades of the nineteenth century progressed, population growth

continued at a substantial rate, although in central areas commercial and industrial activities

reduced the number of residential properties. Demand was therefore eased on the Million Act

churchyards. Indeed, by 1927, St John’s, Park had acquired ‘a somewhat bare and desolate

appearance.’60 By contrast, at Eccelsall, All Saints had remained open, by dint of extensions

in 1860 and 1893. At the century’s end, demand for burial was being met by burial boards

established by ecclesiastical and civic vestries and the town council, the private cemetery

company, Church of England churchyards and a small number of denominational burial

grounds including a Roman Catholic burial ground at Rivelin Glen. Under the Local

Government Act (1894), the newly created City Council took over the burial board

cemeteries but it remained the case that churchyard provision continued to expand: indeed, in

1922 the ‘Church Cemetery’ at Rivelin Glen was extended by three acres.61 Thus, a ‘mixed

economy’ of burial provision was very much in evidence in Sheffield in 1900, challenging

earlier presumptions that through the course of the nineteenth century, the Church of England

lost its near-monopoly of burial space.62

Understanding the burial narrative

Sheffield’s burial narrative is less dichotomised and rather more complex than might be

imagined in an industrial city subject to substantial urban expansion. The closure of the

central churchyards and the opening of the General Cemetery cannot be taken as being the

key events in Sheffield’s burial history. In presenting an alternative narrative, this paper

challenges presumptions about nineteenth-century cemeteries in a number of ways. First,

churchyard burial did not present – as one commentator has claimed – ‘of the world of

stasis.’63 Even by the end of the eighteenth century, new provision was emerging; the Million

Act and Peel Act both substantially multiplied the number of churchyards. The presumption

that churchyards – by contrast with cemeteries – could ‘speak to place’ and connote ancient

tradition clearly did not follow in Sheffield. Christ Church at Pitsmoor was constructed in

60 Odom, Memorials, 117.61 Odom, Memorials, 174.62 J. Rugg, ‘Ownership of the place of burial: a study of early nineteenth-century urbanconflict in Britain’, in R. Morris and R. Trainor (eds) Urban Governance: Britain andBeyond since 1750 (Aldershot, 2000).63 T. Laqueur, ‘Cemeteries, religion and the culture of capitalism’, in J. Garnett and C.Matthew (eds) Revival and Religion since 1700 (London, 1993), 186.

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1849 but by the 1880s a closure order had restricted its interments to no more than a handful

of burials a year. Urban populations spilled out of the existing township boundaries, and new

communities and neighbourhoods were created that lacked any intrinsic, ‘place-based’

traditions. Crookes had been a small village without a church or burial provision before St

Thomas’ opened in 1839. Similarly, at Pitsmoor ‘there was in it no church or chapel of any

religious denomination whatsoever’ before Christ Church was built in 1850.64 In these

circumstances, it could hardly be said that cemetery provision somehow constituted

‘modernity’, when the church itself was a new construction.

Churchyards and cemeteries developed largely in tandem through the course of the

nineteenth century, and cemetery management principles were applied in churchyard

extensions. The cemetery was not the only place where status could be inscribed in the

landscape. Indeed, burial in the churchyard of All Saints at Ecclesall carried considerable

caché, particularly for the Anglican elite: it was ‘crowded with costly memorials to a great

host of prominent citizens and their families.’65 The site was regarded by the Cemetery

Company as its principle competition.66 It is possible to argue that the terms ‘churchyard’ and

‘cemetery’ became, to a large degree, synonymous particularly given the fact that within new

burial board cemeteries established by ecclesiastical vestries, the consecrated sections were

regarded as parochial burial space. Consequently, the Church of England retained a central

role in meeting the need for burial space. The Burial Acts did not signal – as Joyce

maintained – ‘a decisive shift to civil power’ since the ecclesiastical authorities retained

particular rights in the new cemeteries including the right to appoint clergy and to appropriate

burial and memorial erection fees.67Furthermore, Order in Council closures have tended to be

represented as a ‘final’ development, ordered by a central government agency.68 In actuality,

inspections were requested locally and there was negotiation on possible outcomes as St

John’s, Park, clearly demonstrated. In these circumstances it becomes difficult to construe

new burial provision as the State-ordered destruction of centuries-old practices. In no regard

was the French system of burial successfully introduced in England. Indeed, as Kselman

64Odom, Memorials, 122; 139.65 Odom, Memorials, 80.66Sheffield Archives: 106/B1/1-2, Minutes of the General Cemetery Company, 5 Aug 1863.67P. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003), 9268K. D. M. Snell, ‘Churchyard closures, rural cemeteries and the village community inLeicestershire and Rutland, 1800-2010’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 63 (2012) 721–757.

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indicates, centralising and secularised burial regulations were not always easy to implement

in France itself: in rural areas, the new legislation was often simply ignored.69

Conclusion

A history of burial in Sheffield encompassing developments in both cemeteries and

churchyards demonstrates that a clearly discernible shift from one to the other was not

evident in this industrial city. Burial histories are very particular to place, and are dependent

on patterns of denominational affiliation, the chronology of population growth, and the

particularities of local governance. Sheffield is not here proposed as an archetype, especially

given its extremely rapid development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Nevertheless it is probable that developments evident in Sheffield were replicated elsewhere:

the late eighteenth century is one likely common turning point; the high incidence of new

churchyard provision during the 1820s was particularly widespread; on-going churchyard

extension was certainly endemic; the co-operation of landed estate owners could be pivotal to

the economic feasibility of new cemetery development; and the nature of burial board

establishment was markedly variable.70

This paper brings into question common presumptions about burial history that rely

heavily on dichotomised images of cemetery and churchyard, and on the notions of

modernity and secularity as key drivers for understanding change in attitudes towards

mortality in the nineteenth century. Julie-Marie Strange proposes, in her overview of

historical approaches to the study of dying, that ‘the rise of micro-history has militated

against grand narratives of cultural change’ with an increasing focus on continuities.71

Although this commentary refers to beliefs around death and dying generally, the contention

is also applicable to the very specific subject of burial. Sociological musings on the symbolic

nature of cemetery space have overlooked the need for more empirical research. The

cemetery is so agreeably malleable as a symbolic emblem – fitting neatly into larger

theoretical constructs of social hegemony, secularity, and ‘modernity’ – that the facts of the

matter become almost wilfully overlooked. New analytical frames should be applied to an

understanding of burial in an urban context, not least of which is an appreciation of the

69 Kselman, Death and the Afterlife, 170ff.70 Rugg, Churchyard and cemetery.71 J-M.Strange, ‘Historical approaches to dying’, in A. Kellehear (ed.) A Social History ofDying (Cambridge, 2009), 129.

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exigencies of the matter. Both churchyards and cemeteries were created in response to

population demand, with location dictated by the pragmatic desire to find land that was

suitable for burial, and neither too distant nor too costly. For all the potent symbolism that

can be attached to the notion that the dead were sequestered on the city’s outskirts, it

remained the case that this was where vestries found sufficient acreage at a price acceptable

to ratepayers.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to anonymous peer reviewers and the editors for their insightful

comments.

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